Resolution
by Vashtijoy
Summary: It's New Year's Day 2010, and Light is failing to make a new year's resolution, and thinking about all the wrong things. Oneshot.


_New Year's morning, 2010_

There are more objects and concepts in the world than can be counted. Surprisingly, Light is ambiguous on many of them.

People expect Kira to have clear opinions; after all, it's his job to set right and wrong in stone from the top of the mountain. In practice, it doesn't work that way. Often it's because he genuinely couldn't care less; rarely, it's some important matter that he's still thinking through. But more often, the thing is a rule which most people are bound by, but which Light considers himself exempt from, because most people are stupid and he is not.

New year's resolutions are one of those things he doesn't trouble himself with. After all, if you know you're doing something wrong, why wouldn't you correct it at once? What sort of person wouldn't choose to be the best that they could be? That's how Light's always lived; it's one of the things that qualifies him to lead the mass of sheep, who can't be bothered to change their comfortable ways, and so put off self-improvement until some convenient boundary moment. They use symbolism as a crutch and a delaying tactic, and because they've got no desire to change, they never do. And it's not, after all, as if Light has anything left to improve upon—

Well. In theory, he'd like to have gone home for the new year, for all that there's a stultifying normality to those visits with his family – it's all so quiet and everyday. Even as he distracts himself with promises and plans, Kira fades into the background, and for a few hours he's almost just a boy again. He knows everyone's parents infantilise them; it's similar to the way his father always led the taskforce, while Light sat to the side and pretended to be its brain. He doesn't care for the reality check, truth be told – but compared to the drip-drip-drip suspicion he now lives with every day, one of those dowdy visits home might come as a relief. An hour or two, that's all. Not quite offstage, but in the wings, in his rehearsal mask that seemed so heavy when he first put it on, years ago.

But the family house is no longer the home he knew. His father's gone, and Sayu still won't speak, and his mother is run ragged. Light's made time to visit, once or twice, and he still takes Sachiko's calls, hearing her unvoiced fears in pauses and in words not chosen, and in the ghost of her voice. _I was married to your father for twenty-seven years, Light. I know this is something you need to do. I trust you to put it right, but – but—_

If his mother had doubts about his father's work, she's never mentioned them aloud. He knows his father's ashes are still tucked away in the corner of his parents' room, on the far side of his immaculately-made bed, still wrapped in the furoshiki cloth Light tied himself.

(_and Matsuda, the idiot, had looked over his shoulder and glumly asked when he'd learned to do that, and Light hadn't actually __said__ "Shut up, Matsuda"; the angles of his back had said it for him._)

It's part of why Sachiko would like him to be home more. He's the eldest son, the head of the family, and it's his task to put his father in the ground. He knows Sachiko will accept Kira long before she accepts the death of her precious only son, and Sayu has always worshipped him like the god he is. It won't be hard to bring them around, now that the three of them are all that's left. They already believe in him completely.

(_and he'd been furious with the courier who'd come to collect the box; it had been a year or two since name badges began surreptitiously disappearing from uniforms in restaurants and in shops, but Light still glances down out of habit, when he's irritated or displeased, or just because he can, because everyone is their name, and everyone's name belongs to him. And he'd glanced down then, because that was his father reduced to nothing but dust like a foreigner, packed in cardboard and __tape and polystyrene beads, and because the idiot courier should just have __known__ what he had in his hands. "Thank you," Light had said, almost unaccented after five years posing behind L's desk, being his voice. "Be careful with that." And when he'd turned Aizawa had been looking at him with something the man probably didn't __intend__ to be pity, but pity it had been nonetheless, and Light had wanted to kill him as well. But there'd be time for that later._)

Everyone makes resolutions in the new year, whether they realise it or not. In those first hours of 2010, Light's the last one awake, as he always is; he sleeps in front of the others, but he doesn't like it. He doesn't think of his mother, alone except for her daughter who still won't sleep through the night, or of his father; if he bothers himself with thoughts of Misa, it's only in passing, as he assesses the situation she and Mogi have just got themselves into, and congratulates himself for making certain she can't ever give him away.

(_and killing him should have fallen to Light, it was what he did and what he was, he'd readied himself for that moment, he'd __planned it__, damn it, and that was as good as making it a fact, and then the responsibility had been snatched out from under him by some thoughtless idiot who wasn't just misguided, but who was in fact a criminal; who'd brought the righteousness of Light's cause into dazzling relief as little else could, and who'd never, never, never comprehend the magnitude of what he'd done, of what he'd taken away from the world._)

Shifting one consonant, immune to irony, Light thinks only of his revolution. He thinks of Near, of the fractal patterns of their endgame – of all his pieces, human and otherwise, moving into place. He celebrates the perfection of his plans and the quickness of his mind, which are more fulfilling than his family duty could hope to be; without even trying, he drowns Light Yagami's unhappy concerns in the inevitability of Kira's triumph, in all the things he's wanted for so very, very long. And he rejoices, because even when his enemies are unworthy of him, challenging and crushing them is more fulfilling than the worship of the world. It lifts him up like nothing else. It lets him fly so very high that he can reach the resolution he makes every single day: to escape the few uncomfortable bonds of humanity that still tie him down. There's so little left to do, and the sun's almost close enough to touch.


End file.
